Curriculum

Saline Leadership Institute’s program is based on Peter Senge’s Five Disciplines of a learning organization complemented by traditional and progressive leadership methods.

Many key business and non-profit leaders across the country agree that success in today’s business and community organization environments requires an awareness of — and commitment to — the five learning disciplines of organizational learning. Saline Leadership Institute provides a unique opportunity to learn and use the five disciplines with community learning along with other leadership methods to enhance your leadership skills.

Personal Mastery

This is the discipline of personal growth and learning. A learning organization, or community, will encourage all of its members to develop themselves toward the goals and purposes they choose. During these sessions you will learn how to:

  • Clarify and deepen your own personal vision
  • Focus energies on what’s important in your life
  • Commit to continually improving key skills
  • Develop a better balance of work and home life

Shared Vision

A shared vision is not an idea, it is a compelling and powerful force of the heart. It is a picture of what we want to create together. Vision is truly shared when we have a desired picture of the future and are committed to realizing it. People who share a vision are connected by common aspirations which generate focused energy.

Mental Models

This learning discipline helps us better understand and recognize our internal pictures of the world. By being aware of these internal pictures, we are able to realize how they shape our actions and decisions. Our minds move at lightning speed. Ironically, this often slows our learning because we “leap to generalizations” so quickly that we seldom think to test them.

Team Learning

The goal is to transform conversational and collective thinking skills so that groups of people can reliably develop intelligence and ability greater than the sum of individual members.

Systems Thinking

This learning discipline integrates the others, fusing them into a coherent body of theory and practice. Systems thinking allows us to better understand the forces and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems. SLI participants will learn how to think in patterns of circles, not straight lines.

Additional topics covered include:

    • Personal Leadership Development Plan
    • Personality Types
    • Reflected Best Self Exercise developed by the University of Michigan Center for Positive Organizations.
    • Saline Area Vision and SWOT Analysis
    • Dialogue with Community Leaders regarding Priority Issues Identified by Participants